Tuesday, February 7, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Transactionsof the Charles S. Peirce SocietySpecial Issue

“The Meaning of a Thought is Altogether Something Virtual”: Joseph Ransdell and His Legacy

Editors: Catherine Legg, University of Waikato, New Zealand Gary Richmond, LaGuardia College – City University of New York

Joseph Ransdell (1931–2010), based for most of his career at Texas Tech University, offered a highly original and focused challenge within academic philosophy at the end of the Second Millennium. His guiding philosophical passion was truth-directed communication. This led him to think deeply about the Platonic Socrates and the Socratic Plato, and the problematics of early modern philosophy. Most of all, however, he claimed that the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce held the key not just to endorsing truth as a regulative ideal, but to showing how the ideal might be worked out in practice by means of a community of inquiry exercising critical self-control.

From early in his career Joe was concerned that professional gatekeeping was hindering progress in philosophy, and was unafraid to speak about it. From the initial evolution of the Internet he grasped its potential as a place “where people can and do critically question and challenge one another without the usual protections of office, rank, agenda, and official moderation”, something that he argued had “all but disappeared from public life — including intellectual life — in the U.S. and many other countries as well during the 20th Century”.

Thereafter he threw enormous effort and enterprise into realizing this vision, swimming against a rising tide of other kinds of institutional reward. This resulted in the email list and online community peirce-l, which he founded in 1993 and moderated in unique style until his death, and the accompanying website that he beta-launched in 1997 and called Arisbe, after the house where Peirce lived during the later years of his life and dreamed of establishing a research centre.

Joe’s exceptionally conscious and critical approach to nurturing online communication may be seen in the “How the Forum Works” guidelines that he wrote for peirce-l: http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm. Much there now seems prescient in the light of subsequent developments on the Internet, whereby ordinary persons build public knowledge resources with no thought of monetary reward. A key example is of course the astounding Wikipedia, whose success was also arguably due to its open, self-correcting development of its own processes (and who would have guessed that so many would gather there and freely give so much energy to help others learn - except perhaps Charles Peirce?)

Many felt that the mores Joe charted for peirce-l made it a unique and valuable place to do philosophy. Another noteworthy feaure of the list was the way in which its composition mirrored the polymathic and international outlook of Peirce himself. One might find, for instance, a semiotician, a theologian, a computer scientist, and a book translator discussing Peirce’s relation to Leibniz.

We are interested in papers which record, honour, explicate, and critically appraise Joe’s published writings, his online efforts and their ongoing legacy, and the relation between the two. In keeping with the spirit of peirce-l, we welcome submissions from a wealth of disciplines, although we expect philosophy to make a prominent showing.

All papers will be blind-refereed, and should be prepared as such. Submissions should follow the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society manuscript guidelines, online at: http://www.peircesociety.org/contributors.html. They may be submitted by email to Catherine Legg at (requires javascript). The deadline for submissions is September 1st, 2012.

Contributors

Resources

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Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce's name

Pronounced/pɝːs/."Peirce", in the case of C.S. Peirce, always rhymes with the English-language word "terse" and so, in most dialects, is pronounced exactly like the English-language word "purse". Also see "Note on the Pronunciation of 'Peirce'", The Peirce [Edition] Project Newsletter, v. 1, #3/#4, Dec. 1994.

Producers of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce, A Chronological Edition (ongoing) and The Essential Peirce vol. 2. Online gratis: some Peirce writings, various study aids (such as the Robin Catalog, see further down in this sidebar) & Peirce-biographical introductions:

Peirce's texts online

"The Categories" (PDF 177 KiB) MS 403. A later version by Peirce of most of his 1867 paper "On a New List of Categories", interleaved by RANSDELL with the original 1867 "New List" itself for comparison.

Books and Journal Issues about Pragmatism:1990-1999, 2000-2009, often with tables of contents from anthologies and journal issues.

The Metaphysical Club. Brief account plus bibliographies of the individuals. Charles Peirce, William James, Chauncey Wright, along with Nicholas St. John Green (the "grandfather of Pragmatism") & Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

PORT images of Peirce's manuscripts. If you try to save an image but your program seems to give you the sole option of saving it as a .bmp file (which could be huge), try typing the filename including the ".jpeg" extension into the "save as" field.

Gone but unforgotten by the Wayback Machine

Many of the links in the stored old pages lead successfully to other stored old pages (including stored old versions of pages that are still maintained and findable on the Internet). Links to stored high-resolution photo images are a bit spotty sometimes and one may need to visit more than one stored version of the given page in order to find a working link to a given stored photo image.

PORT photo images of Peirce manuscripts. UPDATE: Tepfenhart's home page is back at its old URL and anyway the images are also at GEP. But I'll keep these Wayback Machine links here "just in case". Update's end.

Bill Tepfenhart's Home Page. Photo images of Peirce's manuscripts. Some of the images are around 20MB. I saved one and, for some reason, my computer gave me the sole option of saving it as a .bmp file (and that would have been hundreds of MBs!), but I just typed the old filename including its extension (.jpeg) into the popup window and was able to save it properly.